In June 2025, Fitch downgraded African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) from BBB to BBB minus. On January 28, 2026 it downgraded Afreximbank again, to BB+, which is junk. That came after the bank announced it was ending its rating relationship with Fitch, and the credit rating agency then withdrew its ratings altogether. Since then, GCR confirmed Afreximbank at A in March 2026.
The concerns Fitch raised were the performance of Afreximbank’s loan book. Fitch calculated that non-performing loans had risen to 7.1 percent, partly because it classified exposures to Ghana, South Sudan and Zambia as non-performing. Afreximbank reported a non-performing loan ratio of 2.44 percent. This difference reflected more than accounting treatment.
Afreximbank argued that Fitch had not adequately incorporated the bank’s treaty-based structure, its establishment agreement and the preferred creditor treatment it enjoys among member states. Within the AU, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) raised similar concerns, arguing that sovereign exposures within an African multilateral institution should be assessed with a full understanding of the legal and institutional protections around those exposures.
An institution, serving the same markets, with access to broadly the same pool of public information, received materially different assessments. That divergence shows how much credit analysis depends on classification, context and the strength of the underlying evidence.
It is against this backdrop that the launch of the Africa Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA) on October 7 is both timely and necessary.
For years, African governments, institutions and market participants have questioned whether the global credit rating system fully reflects the realities of African economies.
Concerns have also centred on methodology, interpretation of sovereign risk, treatment of institutional structures and quality of information available to analysts making those assessments.
AfCRA gives the continent an opportunity to improve that process.
The African Union has positioned the agency as an independent, private sector-driven institution that will assess sovereigns, sub-sovereigns and corporates using African data, expertise and context. It will sit alongside established global agencies while adding greater depth to the assessment of African credit risk.
That ambition is important because its success largely depends on the quality of the information available to support those assessments.
The recent experience of Afreximbank offers a useful test case for AfCRA. The value of Afreximbank’s preferred creditor status to a credit assessment depends on a clear body of evidence showing how that status has been treated during periods of sovereign stress, how consistently governments have honoured it, what it means for recoveries and how much protection it provides relative to ordinary commercial lending.
While the institutional argument matters, the data demonstrating its effect matters just as much. AfCRA will, therefore, need to establish credibility through the rigour of its evidence.
An African rating agency will naturally bring deeper familiarity with the continent’s institutions, political economy and development structures. That understanding can improve the quality of analysis, particularly where conventional models fail to capture the way African institutions are designed or how economic activity takes place.
Investors will still expect the conclusions to be measurable, comparable and defensible. This is why the data question should sit at the centre of AfCRA’s work.
AfCRA’s inputs should be independently produced and open to inspection, so an investor can check the evidence and not only the conclusion. This way, the agency can help raise the standard of disclosure across the continent.
AfCRA’s success will ultimately depend on the quality of the information it brings to market and the confidence investors place in its analysis, giving Africa a stronger basis on which its risk is understood, priced and financed.